230 Lamarckian Heredity and Teleology 



Science, July 16, 1897; American Naturalist, Nov. 

 1898), and advocated independently by Adam Sedg- 

 wick (Nature, Sept. 21, I899), 1 that variation is normal, 

 and that heredity is acquired through the operation of 

 natural selection restricting and limiting variation to 

 the extent seen in the relative amount of ' breeding true ' 

 that is actually found in this species or that. It would, 

 indeed, seem a priori more reasonable to ask why such an 

 unstable compound as protoplasm, acted upon by a com- 

 plex environment, should not vary (i.e., why it should have 

 heredity) than the reverse. And, moreover, the compli- 

 cated apparatus necessary for sexual reproduction and 

 transmission, itself showing the wide variations it does 

 in different organisms and in different life conditions, 

 must, in any case, have been acquired, even though it be 

 the direct descendant of the earliest forms of cellular 

 multiplication. Now all of this class of functions - - to 

 come back to our text- -emphasizes the requirement of a 

 theory of the evolution of such a complex apparatus as 

 that of sexual reproduction and heredity, which does not 

 assume Lamarckian inheritance in this case, we may 

 add, one which does not assume heredity in order to ex- 

 plain it. 



Again, it has been argued by Weismann and by the 

 present writer that, if the Lamarckian principle were in 

 general operation, we should expect to find many functions 

 which are regularly acquired by each succeeding generation, 

 such as speech in man, reduced to the stereotyped form of 

 reflexes or animal instincts. 



1 Defrance (Annee Biologique, V., 1891, p. 375) points out that such a view 

 was held by Naudin, and refers also to the theory of the origin of heredity held 

 by Hurst (Natural Science, 1890, p. 578); cf. Delage, Protoplasma, p. 350. 



